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Creating An Interactive Front End Writing Acitivity for the Hip-Hop Word Count Database

I have been interested in trying to create transformative experiences in the browser, whereas most experiences designed for the browser are made to be either static or interactive. Interactive design allows the user to change something on the screen. Transformtive design allows the user themeselves to be changed and to change the world.

In creating this Transformative Poetry piece, I designed the functionality to use existing data, but instead of just allowing users to view it in different ways, I created a web app that allows users to engage with the data, transforming it by creating a unique (as only a particular user can) set of context for it to exist within and as a part of, in the form of a user created poem. The data is presented to the user, not as a finalize portrait created by the author of the website, but instead, the data is presented as material for the users creation of a new 'thing,' one that did not exist before and was not created (and could not be created) by the author of the program/website. So the world is transformed in that, language and cultural productions that discretely existed, in this case lyrics of Kendrick Lamar's, have been appropriated in the re-creation of new langauge and a new piece of media created in the form of a user poem. There is now an additional, discrete, existant, piece of cultural production, which like all cultural productions, transform the world.1 It is in preceding over the transformation of the wor(l)d, that transformation occurs in our lives as humans. Transformation does not take place in the viewing of the world in a new way, it takes place in the creation of new wor(l)ds. By providing transformative environments for interaction we can create technological experiences that are themselves transformative.

The data in the Hip Hop Word Count Database is an excellent source to draw from in creating a web app with transformative function and design. Each piece of data and meta data that can be drawn from the database using an api call or by downloading a json file of the data, and then can be used a pre-built pieces of information to populate an transformative environment. There are an unlimited number of activities and apps that could be created for users to transform the wor(l)d using the Hip-Hop Word Count Database. This project is one of them

1. see historical materialsim and dialogics